This cool, little shoot-em'-up game was developed by Matt Hacket of Yahoo!, who also, among other things, runs the ScriptNode blog where he talks about different aspects of web development, focusing on JavaScript. Feeling nostalgic, he's taken a trip back to better times when games had cool names like "Spacius!" and you only needed 8 bits to rock.
The game he ended up with is a fun little arcade game of the side-scrolling space shooter persuasion. It was made using regular DHTML techniques, ie. old school div elements and images. For sound, he's using Scott Schiller's SoundManager2.
The graphics are simple, the style is retro and the overfeel feel of the game is pretty good, I think. It runs really well on even modest hardware, too. Nice job, Matt.
Matt provides detailed instructions and a bit of background info in this blog post, but here are the important details. The enemies come at you from the right in waves. There are a total of six waves that will come when you reach a certain score. The last wave starts at 10,000 points. Matt says it's really hard and I believe him. There are five different types of enemies, ranging from bombers to meteors and Death Stars.
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Cool, thanks for posting Spacius!
February 11, 2009 at 3:20 PM